Sunday, July 29, 2012

In Global Warming News...

While temperatures are currently hot in parts of the Lower 48 United States (Alaska is having a cold summer) comprising about 4% of the world, we now learn that temperatures over the United States are rising much less quickly than originally thought the last few decades. When the poorly sited stations (see above) are eliminated, the temperature rise the last three decades is minimal. Anthony Watts has details.

Also in the news the last two days is that the IPCC (the folks that won the Nobel Prize) have been wrong about increasing malaria due to global warming.

A recent example is the case of malaria and climate. In the early days of global-warming research, scientists argued that warming would worsen malaria by increasing the range of mosquitoes. "Malaria and dengue fever are two of the mosquito-borne diseases most likely to spread dramatically as global temperatures head upward," said the Harvard Medical School's Paul Epstein in Scientific American in 2000, in a warning typical of many.

Carried away by confirmation bias, scientists modeled the future worsening of malaria, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change accepted this as a given. When Paul Reiter, an expert on insect-borne diseases at the Pasteur Institute, begged to differ—pointing out that malaria's range was shrinking and was limited by factors other than temperature—he had an uphill struggle. "After much effort and many fruitless discussions," he said, "I…resigned from the IPCC project [but] found that my name was still listed. I requested its removal, but was told it would remain because 'I had contributed.' It was only after strong insistence that I succeeded in having it removed."

Yet Dr. Reiter has now been vindicated. In a recent paper, Peter Gething of Oxford University and his colleagues concluded that widespread claims that rising mean temperatures had already worsened malaria mortality were "largely at odds with observed decreasing global trends" and that proposed future effects of rising temperatures are "up to two orders of magnitude smaller than those that can be achieved by the effective scale-up of key control measures."

2 comments:

Susan, thank you for your comment. BEST's latest not only doesn't impress me (as an atmospheric scientist), it doesn't impress the published authors in climate science that I respect.

Dr. Judith Curry: "Their latest paper on the 250 year record concludes that the best explanation for the observed warming is greenhouse gas emissions. In my opinion, their analysis is way over simplistic and not at all convincing." http://judithcurry.com/2012/07/29/a-new-release-from-berkeley-earth-surface-temperature/

Dr. Roger Pielke, Sr. says: "Now, with the new Watts et al 2012 paper, Richard Muller’s conclusion regarding the robustness of the BEST analysis is refuted in the same day as his op-ed appeared. Richard Muller, in his latest analysis, continues to ignore past communications regarding the robustness of his results;" http://pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.com/2012/07/29/comments-on-the-game-changer-new-paper-an-area-and-distance-weighted-analysis-of-the-impacts-of-station-exposure-on-the-u-s-historical-climatology-network-temperatures-and-temperature-trends-by-w/

And, as Dr. Ross McKitrick points out ( www.rossmckitrick.com/ ), this is nothing but "science by press release" (my words). All four of their attempts at publishing a peer-reviewed paper have been rejected. None of the BEST work is peer-reviewed.

Even if the BEST temperature reconstruction is accurate it does nothing but demonstrate that temperatures recovered from the Little Ice Age. We know (from peer-reviewed papers) that temperatures in the Roman Warming and the Medieval Warm Period were both warmer than the temperatures we are currently experiencing.